E-Deliberation

e-Deliberation positions itself as an “online collaboration platform for decision making and strategy building… to solve multi-stakeholder & complex challenges.”

More than any other platform overviewed here, Victoria-based e-Deliberation is designed to not just share information or gather ideas, but to enable decision-making among a large group of participants. To do this, e-Deliberation participants move through a very specific process that was designed on the basis of academic and practitioner best practices in group decision-making, comparable to what is used in high-capacity corporate or organizational settings.

As a result, the e-Deliberation process directs participants through a series of phases of activity, each of which have different rules of engagement, background materials, decision-making processes and decision points or criteria. Different variations on the process are available depending on the complexity of the issue and the desired outcome.

e-Deliberation events are ideally suited for smaller groups of highly engaged participants (an upper limit of about 80 is identified). The level of engagement required by the E-Deliberation process makes it most suited to situations where multi-stakeholder group of people need to determine a common agenda of strategies that will converge to achieve a specific social or organizational impact; both the intensity of the process and the need for high-level written communication skills make it less suited to broad community participation. Projects are set up and priced on a case-by-case basis.